Sure, start scoffing. But Digg's past acquisition talks with Current and News Corp. failed in part because they looked at Digg as a media play, and community-generated sites like Digg aren't particularly attractive to advertisers. More recently, Digg and Google got close to an acquisition. That deal fell apart, according to a source familiar with the talks, because Google wanted to closely probe the quality of Digg's engineering staff early on in the deal, and Digg did not relent until talks were well along. (Digg CEO Jay Adelson refused to comment on the company's talks with Google.) The lesson: Digg's not a media company, and not a technology company. It's something else altogether.

Who makes money off of online community? The surprising answer is Amazon. One study suggests that Amazon.com makes $2.7 billion — billion! — a year in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. Amazon uses the simple mechanism of asking shoppers if a review was helpful to rank its reviews.

It's remarkably similar to Digg's option of "digging" or "burying" a news story. Where might that be useful? Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. In addition to selling digital books, Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the Web. Magazine and newspaper editors are delusionally optimistic that they might be able to charge by the article on a device like the Kindle, through a scheme of micropayments.

Micropayments have been technically possible for more than a decade. The problem has always been consumer behavior: How do you know if an article is worth paying for? The time spent pondering that question isn't worth the nickel people hope to charge for it.

But what if you didn't have to ponder that question? What if you knew, through Digg's rating system, that a large number of people had read the story and given it a thumbs-up?

An Amazon-owned Digg wouldn't have to charge for access to its website or the stories it links to; indeed, that would be against its interests, since the rating activity on Digg requires free access to work. The Wall Street Journal even gives Digg users free access to its stories so they can read them and vote.

Instead, Digg would charge Kindle users for a new service which delivers a personalized newspaper to the device — a service far quicker and simpler than the cumbersome process of going to Digg.com and scrolling through endless lists of popular headlines. They'd only pay for the stories they read — which in turn would provide more valuable feedback on what Amazon can charge for. The payment would be essentially voluntary, since readers could always pull up publishers' websites and read the stories for free there — but they payment would be more for the simplicity and ease of use, rather than the content itself. (Arguably, that's why people pay for music on iTunes rather than download it from file-sharing networks.)

Is Amazon.com thinking about such a move? We haven't heard anything about talks between Amazon.com and Digg. But, intriguingly, we heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in Twitter. Presumably, the attraction would be the same: getting some kind of real-time pulse on what people are interested in.

But Digg's focus on headline voting and Amazon's push into news distribution make them seem like a better match. Will Bezos dig the idea?

(Photoillustration by Richard Blakeley)

What rank hypocrisy! Where's the blame for tapping Yang for the job in the first place? For not pushing him out sooner? And for that matter, for not having a hot-swappable substitute in the executive ranks when Hollywood dude Terry Semel abruptly quit last year? Those are all grave transgressions to which Yahoo's directors ought to confess.

Chairman Roy Bostock should be first out the door. An old-school adman ridiculed within Yahoo as an "empty suit," Bostock has added nothing to the company. And he shredded any remaining credibility by brazenly lying to Newsweek about Jerry Yang's status as CEO, saying he was firmly ensconced in the job even as the board discussed his ouster.

Add to the list investors Ron Burkle, Gary Wilson, and Art Kern, whose ouster I called for earlier this year. Can anyone say what Yahoo has gotten from their collective 26 years on the board?

Corporate raider Carl Icahn, too, should make his stay on Yahoo's board brief and symbolic, a prize won for waging a fierce battle with Yahoo management over its failure to sell the company to Microsoft. He may have been right about Microsoft, but I can't believe he has the company's long-term interests at heart.

And Jerry Yang, who has been allowed to keep his board seat, should resign it. Yahoo needs a clean break from his mismanagement; a lingering presence will only hurt the company he professes to love.

Whoever Yahoo picks as its next CEO should make a priority of mucking out the boardroom; candidates for the job should demand that these six directors offer their resignation before they sign on the bottom line. Otherwise, the job will be untenable.

The rest of the board I'd recommend Yahoo's next CEO keep, at least for the time being. Frank Biondi and John Chapple are too new to pass judgment on; venture capitalist Eric Hippeau and Hewlett-Packard executive Vyomesh Joshi actually have knowledge of the marketplace that's valuable to Yahoo; and telecom exec Maggie Wilderotter is a credible candidate to step in as Yahoo's CEO, should the board choose one of its own.

That's why, for days before it was announced, top executives at Facebook desperately hid technical lead Dustin Moskovitz's plans to leave. They dithered as Mark Zuckerberg tried to persuade his cofounder and college roommate to stay, and others, led by COO Sheryl Sandberg, concocted a plan to spin his departure. That spin has now been dutifully printed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: Facebook's changes are the "type of evolution you see among young growing companies and specifically young growing companies in Silicon Valley," company flack Larry Yu told the paper.

Sandberg, who closely directs the company's PR, would have us think that the uproar that has taken place at the social network since her arrival is a healthy evolution. It is not. The internal politicking she has introduced to the company is destructive, and has sent many of the company's best and brightest fleeing. The list of the departed includes data guru Jeff Hammerbacher, product VP Matt Cohler, platform director Ben Ling, and most recently, Justin Rosenstein, a top engineer who's leaving with Moskovitz. Operations VP Jonathan Heiliger may be next. The defections all hurt. But most of the blame lies with Zuckerberg himself.

Zuckerberg has always styled himself as the company's "founder," relegating the likes of Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, now Barack Obama's Web campaign director, to "cofounder" status. Never mind that this distinction doesn't exist in English; those who start a company are all equally founders.

Zuckerberg clearly considers himself first among equals; he once referred to Moskovitz as "disposable" and a "soldier." The former Harvard roommates patched over those insults, and Zuckerberg said he will rely on Moskovitz's counsel even after his departure.

If Moskovitz really thought he could guide Facebook's evolution, he would have stayed at the company, right? Zuckerberg has a history of churning through confidants. Napster cofounder Sean Parker helped establish Facebook in Silicon Valley as its president, only to be disappeared from the company. Former COO Owen Van Natta was in favor, then out. Sandberg had his ear for a while, but may be losing it. Lately, I hear he favors Christopher Cox, the twentysomething recent Stanford grad he recently tapped as the company's director of product. We'll see how long he stays by Zuckerberg's side.

This fickleness may be predictable from a 24-year-old. But it's fundamentally bad for the company. Yahoo thrived, in its early days, on the partnership between CEO Tim Koogle and founders Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. Google's triumvirate of its cofounders and CEO Eric Schmidt improved on that management form; the troika lends the company some stability by making sure decisions at the top are never unilateral.

Zuckerberg's insistence on the "founder" title suggests that he always planned to rule the company alone. It's a bad plan. His instincts on what kind of website will attract a 100 million users have been spot-on. But he has no business sense. At one point during the Facebook redesign process, he suggested getting rid of advertising altogether, having grown disillusioned with both old-style banner ads and the company's experiments with targeting ads to users' behavior.

Will Zuck ever find an equal partner, a sounding board who can help him turn Facebook into the large, ongoing concern he envisions? Dustin Moskovitz may not have been the right person. Nor, it seems, is Sheryl Sandberg.

Yet to staunch the bleeding of Facebook's technical talent, Zuckerberg will have to find someone to ground him — someone for whom he has enduring respect, who can moderate his worst impulses. Without it, there will be one word describing what's going to happen to Facebook: "founder."